And so I went to one of Siri's makers, Gary Morgenthaler, venture capitalist, Siri investor and Siri board member, for a better answer to the who is Siri? question.

Let's start with her name. Like any doting parent, Morgenthaler and the founding team behind Siri, especially CEO Dag Kittlaus, felt the newborn's existence was of such significance that she warranted a very special moniker. And so they turned to baby name books.

The team put together a shortlist of potential names, but Siri stood out. Siri, a variant of Sigrid, is a Scandinavian and Norwegian girl name that means beautiful or fair victory. The Indian name Siri is associated with Goddess Lakshimi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity.

Siri, to those who gave her life, became an amalgam of those meanings; they defined her appellation as, "beautiful woman that leads you to fair victory and wealth." [Obviously, they overlooked some of Siri's more colorful meanings.]

Siri's personality was of equal importance to the founding team and board, Morgenthaler says, and there were long discussions about who she should be and what she should look like.

"People have found that it is very useful to have a personal assistant that executes their desires, but you have a relationship with that personal assistant," Morgenthaler details of the thought process that went into developing Siri's personality. "It's most rewarding when you're in a constant dialogue, and when you're talking to an intelligent person who is witty, has edge and is a little sassy. If that's the case in the real world, [we said] let's engineer this into the product itself."

The team felt strongly that Siri should not become just another a chatbot. "[Siri] should be highly efficient so that you don't feel like you're wasting time, and you get an intelligent response always," he adds. "But if you ask something funny, Siri should come back with a response that is right back at you."

And so Siri's highly efficient, smart but sassy persona was born. Her personality, first scripted by a creative writer specifically hired for the task, has evolved under Apple's care. Morgenthaler believes that Apple will collect and use speech data to perfect her responses, and make her more whimsical over time.

But why doesn't Siri have a face to match her voice?

"We considered creating an avatar," Morgenthaler says. The team ultimately decided against an avatar because of a scientific hypothesis, termed the "uncanny valley," that maintains that people are endeared to humanized robots, but only up until a point. A too human-looking robot will actually cause repulsion.

And so, in theory, Siri, with her computerized voice and faceless responses, is a robot that's just human enough to merit the term "personality," but far short of what our minds might recognize as an actual person.

Again, the best source of information is Siri herself. What does Siri have to say about this? "Are you a robot?," I ask her. "We were talking about you, not me," she says. "Are you human?," I probe further.

"That's a rather personal question, Jennifer," she quips. Fair enough.

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